Imagine you are so dumb, you decide to rename your company for its biggest failure, and then you get to fire everybody else because they are redundant. Facebook renaming itself Meta is like Tesla changing its name to Cybertruck Inc.
I can’t wait until the AI bubble is over and drags the worst people under.
Is AI the final bubble they’ll inflate? Usually some new tech gets hyped when the old tech fails. See the progression through deep learning, Blockchain, NFT. Or will they do robotics and suddenly it’s robots everywhere. Maybe quantum computing.
Quantum computing will only be useful to a handful of people instead of mass consumer use. Quantum computers are mainly for cybersecurity.
only be useful to a handful of people
So in the end it’s even more useful than the metaverse or NFT, and they hyped that shit up like crazy.
Quantum processors are already a thing. I dont think we’ll see quantum powered consumer products for a while but I think they will eliminate the need for massive data centres and should be way better for the environment.
I dont think we’ll see quantum powered consumer products for a while
Or ever. Quantum processors have to operate close to 0k to work
What do you think we’ll see instead. When it comes to tech, id never say never. But I know what you mean.
When it comes to tech, id never say never.
Eh, there is a degree to that, but there’s also the fact that you can’t just break thermodynamics. With quantum effects you need to remove a lot of noise, and near-0k temperatures will do that.
Not only that, is there even a practical purpose to getting quantum computing on an individual level? While it’s better for specialized problems, current transistor tech is way better at general use cases and is good enough that we don’t really need significantly more power. And even if it was technologically possible to shrink dpwn quantum computing enough to fit in a desktop of phone, what’s going to be the cost of it compared to transistors?
Idk, Miles Dyson was able to engineer a neural-net processor with room temperature superconductors all the way back in 1995…
You mean for computation
Only small parts of specific algorithms get a boost from quantum computing. I could imagine the NAG library offering quantum as a service for some of their routines
AI is kind of different just because of the magnitudes of investments and loans at stake.
It does feel like the moment when somebody pushes ask their chips forward and declares all-in.
Yeah. I mean blockchain is sorta resource intensive but more distributed. Crypto is basically the same thing. AI requires gigawatts of power, is disrupting almost every tech based manufacturing, uses tons of natural resources. All to create terrible content, hallucinate completely made up answers, and automate things to destroy themselves. Great idea guys.
Do get me wrong, I’m not totally against AI. I think it can be a useful tool especially if sandboxed and run locally. But these giant data centers sucking up all the electricity and water are just no bueno.
funny thing and “robots” are mostly controlled by humans.
Or atleast pre-programmed by a human.
Ai Is also a highly specialized technology with a limited number of use cases. though you cant brute force improvement through scaling like you can with ai, so it wouldnt be as good of an investment capital black hole
i think meta largely survives because they got people addicted to instagram, FB via propaganda, and now whatsapp. if it was just solely FB they have, it wouldve been a different sotry.
Meh some people just use it I just use it for Facebook marketplace and porn.
Tbf, Tesla probably sold more cyber trucks than Horizons got users.
XxxCyberTrucKxxX corporation.
More like XxXCyberTrucKKK
Kinda1000% fuck Meta employees tho frBoo fucking hoo, psychos, you know exactly what rideyou signed up for. Kinda like this from Zuck tbh even tho hes a complete ghoul. Meta workers are not on the right side of the billionaire/labor dichotomy
I hope their fucking stocks fail to vest or whatever. Fuckem
I mean find me a company that’s not evil in some way, all companies are run by people and humans at their core are all selfish apathetic cunts, good people are an exception, yeah Meta is evil but so are almost any company at their scale, still of you have options I would not work there, they actively work on destroying society to benefit the parasite class
Why stop there? Fuck all employees of the owning class. How dare they be employed
Meta is a special kind of evil, they’re exemplary
While I do generally agree, there are a LOT of companies that have their own special kind of evil, and ultimately if people are choosing between being employed and working for one, they will work for one. There simply aren’t enough ethical jobs for the number of people who would prefer to work for ethical companies
Its not a dichotomy. Its a spectrum. Meta, palantir they are at the bad end.
Nobody working at facebook has any illusions that they work at a company that helps people make connections and express themselves online. They know its a manipulation machine that oversteps its boundaries, constantly, hoovering up their data. They are also well paid, so its not bread line or facebook. Its a choice.
Many are starting to wake up, but the damage is done. So, its also perfectly reasonable for anyone to not feel sorry for them, if their choice to screw over the world ended up being less beneficial to them than they hoped. That doesnt mean they deserve vitriol or they had it coming.
Couple things.
Firstly; just because they are well-paid does not imply they have the means to survive without employment. In fact that places them far closer to you and I than to somebody capable of living solely off the labor of others. Additionally, large tech companies utilize H1B visas as a form of coercion for both the visa holder and the other employees.
Secondly; you open your first paragraph with
Nobody working at facebook has any illusions
But open paragraph #2 with
Many are starting to wake up
Those two statements contradict each other.
That’s not my point, though! My point is; blame the goddamn reptilian tech bro billionaire and the shareholders. Blame the government that allows Meta to exist at all. Blame the dysfunctional and cancerous-at-best socioeconomic systems that allow either to exist.
Or, to put it more succinctly; don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Being aware it’s not what they present themselves as is not the same as realising you’re helping fascists and genocides.
The world isn’t black and white. I work for a company that’s been around for over a decade. We work with hospitals to improve operational efficiency. This leads to safer outcomes for patients, better working conditions for staff, and less wasted time or money.
We recently signed a limited contract with palantir for a certain software data structure. It’s limited the very specific things. I’m not happy about the contract, but I’m still proud of what I do. I’ve been in different hospitals with and without our company. It’s a big difference and it can literally save lives.
Should I quit then spend months looking for a new job in an economy currently with a very high unemployment rate just because someone online thinks the world is black and white?
lol, what part of saying it’s a spectrum makes you think it’s black and white. We all make decisions based on our interest, and we all have a line. You seem to have gotten closer to yours.
If you’re willing to defend Meta employees on those grounds you’ve got to be willing to give ICE employees a pass too.
Facebook and the other meta companies have done AT LEAST as much damage to society. MORE when you consider they’re ALSO partly responsible for ICE.
facebook is actually the first to do the most damage, by being one of the sole platform for russian backed propaganda to bring people into conservatism. boomers/gen x are the users.
I don’t see a reason to assume Facebook employees are, to a man, engaging in war crimes the way ICE officers are. Maybe some of them are pushing back against their overlords, like these Google employees.
Now if it were to a man… Just yesterday I learned of a Mozilla employee vouching for their partnership with Anthropic, with suspiciously close timing to when Anthropic was used to justify the bombing of children in Iran.
It’s the company they keep and the crimes they enable with their support. You don’t have to be running the gas chambers to know what managing the punchcards is doing.
I was a 6 figure FAANG level employee in the early aughts doing consulting/development, realized I was contributing to predatory lending, quit, and took a 15k a year teaching job overseas instead. If I’d not made that choice, I wouldn’t consider someone who held me personally responsible at some level for the financial crisis to be out of line.
If that’s the case, then are all Mozilla employees also complicit?
Mozilla Used Anthropic’s Mythos to Find and Fix 271 Bugs in Firefox
U.S. Strikes in Middle East Use Anthropic
(cc @Nomad@infosec.pub)
Using a tool versus helping develop one is a very strong distinction. It’s not great that they’re paying for Anthropic, obviously, but they’re also not contributing to Anthropic’s code base. If they were? They’d absolutely be complicit.
The actual product Mozilla is building is still a net positive, or at least not negative, product to put into the world.
Meta developers can make NO such claim. What they are actually MAKING is negative and destructive and they know it. It could not exist without their efforts. The fact another office decides what specific addictive algorithms to use is irrelevant.
What tool is so evil that every Facebook employee is damned for making it? Facebook? WhatsApp?
you don’t choose to work in a factory, but as a sw eng myself, you definitely choose to work in a faang corp. fuck the owning classes but remind the faang workers they’re trying to become the next owner and betraying the working class at the same time.
I saw an interview with some anonymized meta employees and all of them knew they were doing fucked up stuff. Then they said they were doing it for the stocks the company give them after x years worth millions.
So yeah, fuck them.
Really depends on if it is c-suite or the cleaners tbh.
I’m not gonna say ‘Fuck wendy the cleaner who desperately took the first job available to support her sick mother’.
Fuck the brass tho, obvs.
Thats unlikely for that company, i woukd think. There arent really AI janitors yet as far as i know
Not anymore anyway, they got zucc’d
Honestly doubt that, theyre probably externally contracted out already
Yeah another thought to have though is that 8,000 Meta employees suddenly on the market makes life harder for other people who’ve been laid off and are still looking for work, some of them for a whole year without success.
Thats the only audience i maybe have empathy for but im sure things are quite different at that level of jobs and compensation
For years, Meta has been hell for smaller companies trying to hire, because Meta would routinely offer $100k over the market rate, and hire people just to hire them. I swear about half a dozen times I interviewed people and made them job offers only to realize afterward that all I accomplished was giving them a bargaining chip for their negotiation with Meta.
Now it’s the reverse. People are out in the cold searching for work while Meta dumps all those people they overhired back out into the market, where their time at Meta gives them an edge. Yes, we can hate Meta all we want but it still looks good on a resume.
And yes life is different on tech wages but these are still people with bills to pay and families to feed. My HCOL property taxes are equivalent to some people’s entire mortgage.
One thing to note is Facebook bought a ton of other companies. So some of those people didn’t choose to work there at all they just stayed because they needed to keep their job. Some may even be trapped by circumstances like visas or medical needs. Companies don’t only screw over their users. They buy people and screw them too.
Staying is still a choice tho and if thry were retained, they likely tasted some action. Im not going to feel sorry for the closest analog billionaires have in the labor force, they will be fine, however impossibly far apart as they may be in reality
I wouldn’t work for Facebook if they tripled my current salary.
I take that back, I have enough leave saved up I could reasonably take a 4 month sabbatical so I would for about 4 months to make a years salary in that short amount of time and then tell Facebook to fuck off.
I wouldn’t work for Facebook if they tripled my current salary.
Okay, tap the breaks. Triple my salary and I’m retiring very comfortably before I hit 50. Would happily take the Zuck Bucks for that kind of cash, especially if I knew I’d be ushered into the Leisure Class ten years earlier.
Also… who else are you working for that’s less toxic? Like, Fuck Zuck, but he’s hardly an outlayer in the world of narcissist CEOs.
In all seriousness he absolutely is worse than most. He operates on more impactful sale, a third of the world is his monthly userbase. His whims hurt people.
I’ll just say they do exist. It’s not with out caveats mind you but its been pretty good for 25 years
You mean in 4 months you’d unilaterally change your ToS. They’re familiar with that practice, they’ll get it.
Good for you? 10000s of other people would.
FANG jobs are still highly desirable and prestigious.
Which is really the problem. They are using the Harley Davidson business model. Make something hard to aquire and people will perceive it as more valuable. They have a tough interview process, it demands skills that aren’t needed for the job. The job itself is just like any other large corp job. Lots of overhead, lots of bureaucracy. They do this because it keeps their pipeline of candidates full. But also because people who get hired will often feel like they were given a chance to prove themsleves or something. But in reality, very few people will know the difference between someone who was highly successful there and someone who was not.
And most of them have a lots of custom software that was developed in house. I interviewed a guy from AWS not long ago. Nice guy, clearly trapped in a shitty work environment. Been there long enough to be senior. Trouble is he had no experience or even exposure to the tools we needed. All he had was AWS experience. If he was less than senior, that would be fine, but for a senior roll, he needed to have somthing else. They do that to make it garder for people to leave.
In my mind, fang is a waste of talented people. With the skills needed to pass the interview, most could do a lot more somewhere smaller.
yeah, but those jobs carry a lot more social prestige, and that is very valuable in other ways.
Well yeah I get that. But I wouldn’t trust them for stable employment when they make decisions like this. Of all the FANG jobs about the only one I would trust is Apple honestly.
Very few jobs offer stable employment, esp ones that are high paying.
You’re totally right. High reward, high risk. The trick is to maximize the reward by keeping risk under a threshold. Unless you’re 25 with no responsibilities then it’s balls to the wall, I’ll sleep when I’m dead.
You will come to regret wasting your life on work.
FANG? Facebook, Amazon, ???, Google.
Nabisco. Lots of fancy chips.
Or maybe Nvidia?
No, believe it or not it used to be Netflix because it was so high in the stock market value.
They also pioneered some pretty cool tech to support their streaming.
Not sure if this is a whoosh moment in that Netflix is on the decline, but, the N is Netflix 😄
They’re going to need to show us the strangest things they can find to stay relevant at this point!
MANG?
All these companies bragging about AI is just synonymous with how little they care about people.
an ANDROID is unlikely to have human emotions.
Can’t wait to read a near-future article about all those employees making a new company that is unionized private non-stock and does better than Zuck’s Facebook. Making an open-source Facebook alternative so good that they end uo replacing Facebook altogether
Also, some people were open to making an open source business community on this platform to share how to get different businesses up and running, and how to grow/maintain them. Wonder if they would still like to do that
You must be new around these parts. Facebook (and the rest of big tech) are monopolists. For the past ~26 years, the tech industry has been using illegal anticompetitive tactics to suppress competition and destroy potential competitors. The government has done nothing, because they’re stupid and think “big = good”.
An example is Instagram. It was a start up that was growing rapidly, and actually became a threat to Facebook. What did Facebook do? They placed a massive bid to buy the company at like 10x their actual market value. It’s an offer so huge that every investor in Instagram would support the deal even if the founders were against it.
A sane government would see that as an obvious anticompetitive decision, and block the merger. Facebook should instead use that money to improve their own product and compete fairly. Obviously, that didn’t happen, the merger went through, and Facebook is still the owner of Instagram. Users and the tech industry at large are worse off.
Look at TikTok’s huge success. If they weren’t a Chinese company, they probably would have met a similar fate. Unfortunately for Facebook, they weren’t allowed to buy a Chinese company.
*because they are bribed to think “big = good”.
Don’t think they’re stupid; they want you to think that. They are greedy, short-sighted, and unempathetic to their fellow man. Their actual intelligence varies widely, but there are brilliant minds among them that lack the psychological traits that prevent our species from wiping itself out.
To be honest I prefer one place such as facebook to 108 places they acquired like facebook. Can you imagine having 108 platforms to register at and keep track, because each of your friends prefers a different one?
Cool and they well eat and pay their bills with unicorn farts and rainbows.
It would take a lot to replace Facebook at this point, not only that but they are into much more then just social media. It would be awesome to see something happen, but even Google failed to beat them.
That being said, I can’t tell you how many times people started a business network, resource, etc on Reddit over the past 15 years. They don’t work, people get bored, people show up for the first few days then forget they exist, etc. It would be awesome to help others get to the point where they could launch and become successful, but it takes time and every on both sides, and most people aren’t willing to do the work either way long term.
I wish I didn’t agree with you, however, I have friends who rail against Facebook constantly and still send me Instagram links and use their meta headsets. Facebook is too ingrained into the social media structure to just easily be replaced. There’s about as much chance of replacing Facebook as Blue sky was at replacing Twitter. No matter how much people hate the people in charge, they’re still going to continue to use their product.
Im in that boat. Only reason im on Instagram is because the only way I can stay in continued contact with my friends and family is through it. If not for that this would be the only social media I would use
all those employees making a new company that is unionized private non-stock and does better than Zuck’s Facebook
Facebook thrived because it got access to cheap money through Carlyle Investments. They used that cheap money to buy up a bunch of their competitors (most famously, Instagram, but there’s 108 different acquisitions in the Wikipedia list alone) and either insource them or close them out.
Very real possibility that a gaggle of Facebook refugees form a new company, get some decent Series A or B financing, start to take off on user numbers, and grow big enough to be worth adding to some bigger firm’s M&A list.
But the idea that they’re going to capture the 1B+ user Facebook market share? On what hardware? With what IT support? In partnership with which ISPs? Through which advertisement agencies? Come on, dude. Think about how these businesses function in practice. Setting aside how many “Facebook Clone” companies have flopped, there’s a value-add to Facebook that comes directly from their deplorable business model. You can’t make a “better Facebook” without sacrificing what makes the Facebook revenue play work. That’s before asking how you’re going to win a headbutt fight with a dinosaur.
Remember diaspora?
Personally, I prefer social communities to not be so heavily monetized. On the other hand, it would be nice if Frendica ran a bit better, but I can hardly complain if I’m not giving any time/money to that project to make it so.
Why is that not already a thing?
Being blunt. I am 48 and have 3 kids to feed and 2 have disabilities. I have no interest in the risk that comes with doing something pro bono on the hopes it will work especially when everyone else is doing it pro bono. There’s no immediate individual incentive.
I may want socialism but I live in a capitalist world. I can’t have me and my family survive on good feelings.
Even if Meta replaced its entire workforce with AI, payroll savings would only be roughly $27 billion, a fraction of the $145 billion infrastructure spend.
Hey now, that infrastructure is good for, like, 3 years, so it’s really like spending $145 billion to save $81 billion. And that doesn’t even start to get into how much it costs to operate that infrastructure.
Removed by mod
Not just him. All the billionaire leeches please.
Your comment may seem extremist. People may find it distasteful or even straight up illegal.
But then I wonder: wouldn’t a similar comment have been received the same way if it was made about Hitler in 1920, before he became what we know now? And yet, it would have been the sane thing to do…
deleted by creator
No need to shoot him, we just need an independent court to put him on trial for enablement of the Rohingya genocide and knowingly gaining $14 B in commissions from fraud (while developing a “playbook” to claim that this was legal).
Don’t even need to shoot him, it would be much better to give him 50 year community service as a junior janitor on the Rohingya refugee camp on the island of Bhasan Char should he be found responsible. If he is too good for that, than he can do 50 years in prison instead.
This should also apply to any other senior executives involved in these two cases.
And these are just two cases, there are definitely other, less well known, “regional” cases involving Meta goons and Zuckerberg.
Content moderation like this is the silliest fucking thing
I’d kind of expect more than that.
Meta’s said that they’re going to to be shifting focus from VR to AI.
It looks like Meta’s VR wing employs 15,000 people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Labs
Number of employees: 15,000 (2026)
Though…hmm. It says that there are some AI things under that as well, so maybe that’s not all VR:
Reality Labs, formerly Oculus VR, is a business and research unit of Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook Inc.) that produces virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) hardware and software, including virtual reality headsets such as the Quest, and online platforms such as Horizon Worlds. In June 2022, several artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives that were previously a part of Meta AI were transitioned to Reality Labs.
WTF are they doing with fifteen thousand employees?
Given that the Metaverse stuff hasn’t been commercially successful thus far, burning a lot of money.
I have a Quest headset, and I have no idea. But of course I don’t want anything to do wih their “metaverse”, so I would’t be able to see where most of their work went.
What I can tell you is the parts I did use, like the system UI and app store, are complete shit and never improved one bit through the years.
The app store is especially terrible for a company with those resources. It’s using the worst machine translation I ever saw (forget LLMs, this is a lot worse than 2010 google translate). It has terrible search and discoverability options for a store that has comparatively so little content.
Whenever I find something interesting in it, it’s also regularly failing transactions with a major bank in my country. I’m almost listing that as a pro since it discouraged me to get stuff from a headset-locked store that will be completely abandoned very soon.
Ok, but if you work for ZuckerDork (or anyone like him) and get laid off then I have no sympathy. None at all.
You were and are part of the problem. The end.In fact, getting laid off is far better than what I wish for you.
Which company of angels are you working for? So I know where to work next
The NHS.
Ah yes that saint known as the UK government.
I know, free healthcare. Those dastardly bastards. How dare they!!!
…say, what free healthcare service is your government providing?
Dude… Get real, people need jobs and will take what they can get.
These people are at a much different level, they went there for stock
And I’m sure they’ll willingly leave their well paying jobs in this economy…
I hope they saved up their undeserved bonuses for slapping their name on other people’s work :)
Be grateful for the gig economy, Peasants!
Seems he’ll really need that expensive security detail after all.
We can get as angry as we want at billionaires, the sociopathic ghouls that they are, but I really feel that’s just a distraction to encourage us to look a symptom when we really need to focus on the disease.
I am curious what do you see as being disease? What’s going on in the US seems like a pretty typical oligarch takeover of political parties, judiciary and media (this is not even something unique to the US, can and does happen in many places).
Solving the disease of course depends on the given local context, but more often than not you will have to prosecute oligarchs in addition to a broader package of anti-corruption and judicial reforms.
You nailed it. The disease is the breakdown of the rules of society that allow the oligarchs to exist and fester.
I see. Agreed, the root cause for the rise of oligarchy is arguably a much bigger issue than any given individual oligarch.
the ANDROID zuckerborg sees humans as expendables. he is a pretty calculated CEO though, he and parker ensured that he has majority country over FB’/META so he cant be ousted by a BOARD.
Is this the technology forum or fuckai/fuckwork/fuck meta forum.
Jesus H Christ
I understand those are popular positions for the average Lemmy user but the negativity is really off-putting
It’s part of my day job to keep up with tech news, and these days there isn’t a news story about tech that isn’t all about AI. The good, the bad, the ugly, it’s all AI all the time. Even hyper specific industry news that should be all about M&A and product launches is just all AI as well (when it isn’t just “CEO Says” articles, most of which are just more AI BS).
When a new company has something to announce that isn’t AI, they will sandwich it between two AI announcements just to get the views and placate the investors.
it also became super-entertwined with this admistrations, normally i dont keep up with it.
AI is the buzz at the moment and is driving investment. From the perspective of the business of selling tech it matters most.
But that’s largely because companies involved in tech are trying to find use cases for AI that can move the needle, as is the case for many new technologies in search of a problem to solve.
If the starting position is “fuckai” or “fuckwork”, or “fuckzuck”, well I guess thats awesome but doesn’t really seem like a conversation about tech or how it may eventually solve problems or change the world.
almost all the tech conference schedules around us are peddling AI in one form or another, they mostly abandoned other forms of tech that are actually useful. i see alot of things falling apart after it bursts.
Do you feel like AI and its current form is ever going to go away?
To me it seems like we’re well beyond the point of it going away ever. It may never live up to the hype of replacing all the jobs.
We also know that AI companies are footing a large chunk of the bill. Someday those prices are going to crank up and a bunch of work we shovel over to AI will go back to humans.
Heck, it may have peaked already - we may not have any more killer uses to discover. Or maybe we do, and that’s partly why I’m here - I’m pretty interested to see if some interesting uses cases emerge. Some really tough or annoying problem that we all hate to do that AI can start actually doing really good work at.
It’s Technology news, I’m not sure what else to tell you.
